Listening to Prestige 593: Lightnin' Hopkins

LISTEN TO ONE: Stranger Here

 Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins recorded any time, anywhere, with any musicians, for any label, and for that matter, under any name. Throw in all the nom de session recordings, and the total is anyone's guess, but he may well have been the most recorded of all blues singers. His last time out for Prestige, he was recorded in Texas with local musicians, some of them his road band at the time, and produced by folklorist Mack McCormick. This time he's in New York -- Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to be precise -- with Rudy Van Gelder manning the controls, Ozzie Cadena producing, and two first rate jazzmen, Leonard Gaskin and Herbie Lovelle, backing him up.

Both were versatile musicians, at home in a variety of styles. Closest to Gaskin's heart was probably trad jazz, and Lovelle possibly rhythm and blues, but both had played across the board (they'd played together once before, on Gaskin's Prestige All Stars outing). Hopkins's last session had featured Texas drummer Spider Kilpatrick, who was praised in the liner notes to an Arhoolie album:

Finally here was a musician who could follow Hopkins wherever he went, plus one providing a snappier beat that the guitarist could hang phrases of a bit more aggressive nature than usual on.

That was not going to be the case with Gaskin and Lovelle. The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings describes their accompaniment thus:

they are propulsive rather than responsive and never allow the music to drag.

Either way, it's still Lightnin' Hopkins: clever, wry, passionate, deep in the tradition, and an inexhaustible source of material, much of it made up on the spot, all of it deeply personal, and yet touching on universal themes.

Hopkins, of course, recorded so prolifically that listening to everything he ever recorded would be a Herculean labor. But just listening to the Bluesville recordings reveals a lot. The musical standards of jazz are exacting in the extreme. The cutting sessions in Kansas City speakeasies, at Minton's Playhouse, were designed to weed out all but the most technically adept. The story of a young Charlie Parker being forced off a Kansas City bandstand by Jo Jones throwing a cymbal at him is one of jazz's most enduring legends. So it's understandable that a jazz critic, praising the work of Gaskin and Lovelle, would comment on their ability to "follow his ramshackle, instinctual sense of rhythm quite dexterously, giving Hopkins' skeletal guitar playing some muscle." Hopkins's guitar playing had plenty of muscle, as the instrumentals on this session and the previous Houston session show. More to the point, Hopkins's professionalism is shown in his ability to adapt to the seat-of-the-pants accompaniment of his Texas cronies and the exacting standards of New York jazzmen. 

Naturally, pros like Gaskin and Lovelle are going to set the tempo, "propulsive rather than responsive" in the Penguin Guide's wonderfully descriptive phrase. As Elvin Jones put it, 

The greatest contribution jazz has made in music has been to replace the role of the conductor with a member of the ensemble who, instead of waving his arms to keep time and convey mood, is an active member of the musical statement. That person is the drummer.

But like the conductor, the drummer is there to serve the music, and the soloist. If you want Lightnin', it's wonderful to hear him in two such different settings. But essentially, if you want Lightnin', you get Lightnin'.

Goin' Away was a Bluesville release, and the two 45 RPM singles that came out of the session were also on Bluesville: "Business You're Doin'" / "Wake Up Old Lady" and "Goin' Away" / "You Better Stop Her." Jazzdisco, my main discographical source, began with its 1963 listings to include release dates, so I know that both the singles were released in 1963, and apparently quite close together: their serial numbers are Bluesville 45-823 and -824.